Citrus County

by John Brandon

  “Why am I going to need gifted?”

  Mrs. Milner looked astonished. “Friends,” she said. “These will be your friends. Do you think those regular kids out there have any idea how to be friends with someone like you?”

  “I’ve never seen a lot of point to friendship,” Shelby told her. “Starts as an interview, ends as a job.”

  Mrs. Milner turned sad, a woman crumbling under the weight of her unheeded wisdom. She rested her hand on Shelby’s forearm and Shelby gently peeled it off and whispered the word “No.” Shelby stood above Mrs. Milner like a holy person over a disciple, the icemaker humming like a distant choir.

  Shelby and Toby followed the main trail to the public library. They walked quickly, outpacing the mosquitoes. They heard the robotic xylophone music of an ice cream truck. The music grew distant, then close, then trailed away altogether.

  In the library, Toby went into the computer lab with Shelby and they shared a chair. She saw him reading along as she relayed bits of light gossip from school. Aunt Dale liked middle school gossip. Shelby wrote that she wondered if Icelanders used ketchup, if they went skiing a lot, what the drinking age was. After sitting stumped for a moment, staring at a poster of Mel Gibson reading a book, she pecked in:

  I’m dating a boy named Toby. I think about him all day. He’s got a little boy belly but his arms are as hard as a steering wheel. He smells like wet logs and doesn’t have one freckle. He’s not like anyone else. I’m waiting for him to work up the nerve to put some earnest moves on me. I would like one adult in the world I can speak openly to and who will speak openly to me, and I choose you.

  That would get Aunt Dale’s attention. Aunt Dale had been sharing plenty about herself, answering all Shelby’s questions. It was time Shelby shared.

  She hit send. She let her eyes drift around until she was looking at Toby. He’d read her message and was making such an effort to be blank-faced, he appeared grave. Nobody else could unnerve Toby, but Shelby did it every other day.

  “You look insane,” she told him. “You look like the person that wrote the ice cream truck music.”

  “I’m insane?” Toby asked.

  Shelby logged out of the computer and slipped her library card in her pocket.

  “Don’t tell your Aunt Dale anything about me,” Toby said. “I don’t want to be included in this experiment. Being honest with adults?”

  “Aunt Dale isn’t a normal adult.”

  “And I’m not a normal kid. Hard as I try.”

  Toby picked up a basket on his way into the grocery store. He put some ground beef and a tomato in the basket, to seem normal. He stood in the medicine aisle. There was a section for upset stomach, and he grabbed something from there. There were pills especially for nausea, and he grabbed those. There were a bunch of boxes with coughing children on them. Toby hadn’t been to the bunker in three days. The sun was going to keep setting and rising. Toby wondered what Kaley was thinking. Toby had skipped a day before, but never two and certainly not three. She would run out of food today or maybe tomorrow. After that, Toby had no idea how long it would take. She was sleeping in her own filth, trying to become as much of a mess as she could, knowing Toby would have to clean her up. Her wounds were getting infected—her elbows and knees. The water and the jug of iced tea and the juice packets wouldn’t last. Toby wondered at what point she would stop expecting him, at what point she would know in the pit of her stomach that she was absolutely alone in the world. She had no allies and was losing her only enemy.

  Toby had glimpsed it. While walking alongside Shelby, he’d seen how things could be, how they would be, when Toby had nothing to hold him back, nothing squeezing his soul like a terrible vine. He could do it. He could leave Kaley down there. Toby didn’t have to answer to his evil. He could do what was right for himself and for Shelby. The sun kept going down and it kept coming up, and if Toby could keep clear of the bunker then one of these days when it came up it would find Toby unfettered.

  Toby told himself he wasn’t in the grocery store to get medicine for Kaley. He was getting medicine in order to restock Uncle Neal’s cabinet, before Uncle Neal noticed and went nuts. Uncle Neal wouldn’t notice, though—not at this point. Toby looked at the ground beef and the tomato in his basket. He got more medicines, not any of the boxes with children on them. There was something meant to boost your immune system. Regular old multi-vitamins—couldn’t hurt. Toby got lip balm and antibiotic ointment. He kept looking at the coughing children on the boxes of kids’ medicine. They were trying to look sad, trying to trick Toby. They weren’t real children.

  Springstead’s coach, the rival of the coach who was starting the lawn service, had beady eyes and neck muscles. Mr. Hibma did not go over and speak to him before the game, as was the custom among coaches, and the guy seemed not to notice, wrapped up as he was in the fact that his point guard had a bad ankle. He kept making her try it out, hoping she could play.

  The first time Springstead had the ball, Mr. Hibma put on Earl Ray, a half-court press, throwing Springstead’s shaky backup point guard into a profound fluster that remained with her the rest of the game. The poor thing dribbled off her shin, threw the ball in the stands. Meanwhile, Mr. Hibma’s point guard got into the paint whenever she felt like it. She was a magical sprite who’d cast a spell on the ball. She’d also, Mr. Hibma noticed, cast a spell over a spindly boy with long hair who now sat in the second row at each game. Since Mr. Hibma’s regime of beauty had begun, the team had gained four boyfriends, which, added to the three it’d already had—the pretty benchwarmers’—gave the Citrus Middle girls’ basketball team a not-too-shabby following. If Mr. Hibma wasn’t mistaken, he was doing a serviceable job coaching. Maybe he could be a teacher. Of course it couldn’t be that hard; look at all the people who managed it. Mr. Hibma had just been lazy. He’d been daunted by the idea of selflessness, of commitment.

  His team won, 29 to 5. Mr. Hibma wanted to criticize them, to prevent them from growing complacent, so he raised his voice and informed them that they’d made a liar out of him. He’d made a promise. He’d given his word that they would shut Springstead out.

  Mr. Hibma set himself up on his couch and began filling in a fresh grade book. He had a list of all the assignments he’d given and printouts of his class registers. He had to start from scratch. He’d turned his classroom upside-down, but the grade book was nowhere to be found. It had made its way into the wide world and Mr. Hibma would never hear from it again. He could handle it. Every job had difficulties. Everyone’s time got wasted.

  Mr. Hibma listed the kids’ names, then the assignments and dates. He had this grade book crisis under control. He could estimate, by this point in the year, what each student would score on each assignment. Once in a while, though, an A student bombed something or a D student cobbled together some lucky guesses. The safe way was to make sure each kid ended up with a higher average than expected. Mr. Hibma plugged away at the grades for over an hour, until his eyes began to feel strange. Very strange. He set his grade book work aside. He felt like he was stoned, except he wasn’t hungry, didn’t feel lazy. It was like being stoned in way that sharpened one’s mind rather than dulling it. Mr. Hibma could smell the garbage in his kitchen trashcan. He could see magnified details from the Springstead game—the mole on the opposing center’s shoulder, the scuffs on the players’ shoes. Mr. Hibma’s identity felt shifty. The vocab words he’d assigned that week ran through his head. Reductionism: the theory that every complex phenomenon can be explained by analyzing its simplest physical mechanisms. Reechy: smoky or sooty. Mr. Hibma wanted the television on. He dug the remote out from under the couch cushions and hit the power button. Professional wrestling. The wrestlers preened around the ring. One of them luxuriated in the upper hand, tossing his hair.

  Mr. Hibma took out the garbage and replaced the bag, then he began dusting. He shoved several rags in his pockets and carried a can of Pledge. In high corners he found cobwebs. He dusted every flat surface
he could find, working up a light sweat, then returned to the kitchen and threw out all the rags, clean or dirty. He dug out butter, flour, milk, sugar, eggs. He banged around in his drawers until he found a yellow sheet of paper on which was written a recipe for rugelachs. It was the old man’s recipe, the man who’d given him the inheritance, the man whose inheritance he had blown. Incredibly, Mr. Hibma had all the ingredients he needed.

  Preparing the rugelachs did not help. Mr. Hibma got them into the oven, set the timer for twenty-five minutes, and began pacing laps around the inside of his villa. Everything he looked at annoyed him. He fetched a garbage bag from the kitchen and took it to his CD rack. He dropped new wave CD after new wave CD in the bag, until the plastic began to tear. He got another bag for rock, another for classical. He tied the bags and rested them near the door, then advanced to the bedroom and dealt with his wardrobe. His socks had holes in them, T-shirts had pit-stains. He stuffed two more garbage bags. He went to the kitchen, where the rugelachs were almost ready, and disposed of old vitamins and spice bottles and coupons, musty macaroni boxes. He took the rugelachs out of the oven and placed them on a platter to cool. He grabbed all the trash bags he’d filled, heaving them over his shoulders, and lugged them in one load out to the dumpsters.

  On the way back, he stopped at the mailboxes. There was a letter, forwarded from Clermont. D. Register. Mr. Hibma rubbed his thumb over the return address. His ears began to buzz. Holy shit, Dale had written him back. Mr. Hibma’s forehead tingled. He had no idea who he was. He was in the middle of Florida, at a bank of mailboxes. He sniffed the envelope and it smelled salty. He wasn’t going to fumble ripping it open. He was going to tear it evenly across the top.

  Mr. H,

  I have decided to respond to you even with the risk that your plan is not in earnest, because if you fail to do what you propose, your letters themselves may constitute some sort of art. I understand that this is probably a hoax, but the world needs all kinds of people, even perpetrators of hoaxes.

  Mr. Hibma didn’t feel stoned anymore. When a stranger from another continent challenges the validity of your very self, you are no longer stoned. Dale had written him back. His letter hadn’t been redirected by handlers. Dale was interested in Mr. Hibma. She wanted to believe he could kill someone. She wouldn’t say that, but Mr. Hibma knew. Inside, she was rooting for him. She believed in his old self, the self from before he’d started trying to change. She wasn’t a stranger. Mr. Hibma had something like a friend. For him, this was what a friend was.

  Mr. Hibma felt like a con man and he felt gullible. He’d conned himself with this plan to mold himself into a real middle school teacher, a monitor, a mentor, and he’d fallen for it. What was he trying to do to himself—hosting wing meetings and buying greeting cards and forcing his smile on everyone and carrying his burritos across the hall to the lounge to sit in there with the rest of them? He’d seen this as his future and it was coming apart in a matter of moments. He was ashamed. He’d been trying to make things easier on himself, as if they ever could be.

  Mr. Hibma went inside and gorged himself on the rugelachs, stopping every couple minutes to read Dale’s letter again. It was handwritten. Mr. Hibma had Dale’s handwriting and she had his. He was getting grease smudges all over the paper. He didn’t care. He had no idea what Dale looked like, and he wished he could picture her at her desk, overlooking Reykjavik, a begrudged grin on her face as she wrote Mr. Hibma’s reply. He had no idea if he was conning Dale as he’d conned himself. He had no idea if he could follow through on his proposal, and he didn’t expect to know. It wasn’t something you guessed at. Mr. Hibma was going to find out if he was indeed a perpetrator of hoaxes. He was going to find out if he could change the basic fabric of his life. He was going to call his own bluff.

  PART THREE

  His evening free, Toby took a walk with Shelby after track practice. The days were getting longer. The woods were producing that ticking sound that came with heat. They walked alongside a straight country road on a trail beaten into the weeds. They neared the post office and could hear that something was happening on the other side. It was a fundraiser. Toby and Shelby listened to some people talking and understood what it was for. The last train that would ever push itself through Citrus County was scheduled for next Thursday, and after that the tracks would have no use. These people had gathered with the intention of turning the tracks into a bike trail. They looked like bikers, most of them. Toby could imagine them wearing fingerless gloves and bright helmets.

  “I don’t know how I feel about this,” Shelby said. “Walking along train tracks is important for little kids.”

  “I used to do it,” said Toby.

  They did a lap around the gathering. There were T-shirts, bumper stickers. Someone from a bike shop had a table set up. Everyone was united.

  “I’m not going to worry about it,” Shelby said. “I’m going to support this.” She took a five-dollar bill out of one of her pockets and dropped it in a big jar. “It’s not my job to protest things.”

  “We’re entitled to a hot dog,” Toby said.

  They moved to the refreshment table and picked up hot dogs and cans of soda. There was a backhoe sitting on the edge of the post office lawn, and Toby and Shelby went and sat in the yellow scoop, in the shade. The backhoe was enormous. It was hard to say if its presence was related to the fundraiser.

  Toby sipped his soda. He unwrapped his hot dog from many layers of limp tin foil. He felt comfortable with all the people around. He liked being with Shelby when there was no chance of them making out. He watched her open ketchup packets and mustard packets and squeeze them.

  “My mom used to take these from places,” she said.

  Toby didn’t really want his hot dog, now that he smelled it. The soda was enough.

  “Fast food places,” Shelby said. “Even something like this. She’d clean them out. We had buckets of sweetener.”

  “Were you poor?” Toby asked.

  “Not really. She was, growing up.”

  “I don’t consider that stealing,” Toby said.

  “To this day, when I use a big ketchup bottle it feels like a treat.”

  Shelby stacked the empty packets in the tin foil and balled the foil up. She took a bite of her hot dog. Dusk was coming on, but there were no crickets out or anything. People were still showing up to the gathering, hardly anywhere to park.

  “Look at that little thing,” Shelby said.

  Toby craned his neck. It was a tree frog, right next to Shelby’s leg. It looked frightened. It didn’t belong in the scoop of the backhoe, shady spot or not.

  “I used to have one of those as a pet,” Toby said.

  “Did you catch it and keep it in a jar?”

  “He appeared in my shower one day. Every time I went in there he was in a different spot.”

  “Did you name him?”

  Toby shook his head. He watched Shelby wipe ketchup off her lip.

  “He kept losing color,” he said. “See how that one’s so green?”

  Shelby didn’t move away from the frog, but she didn’t try to touch it either.

  “There was nothing for him to eat. I had to let him go.”

  Shelby looked at Toby before she finished her hot dog. “That counts,” she said. “That’s a story you shared with me.”

  Toby shrugged.

  “I’d like to see somebody say it wasn’t.”

  Toby looked over at the crowd. The edge of the backhoe scoop was digging into his legs. He had given Shelby something of himself, but he felt like he’d gotten something. He’d given and now he had more. That was the trick. The thing he’d been trying to get from Shelby, whatever it was, he could only get by giving. He could smell Shelby. She smelled like clean, clear water. He moved his hot dog farther away from him. He didn’t want to leave the backhoe scoop. In the scoop, he didn’t have to think about anything he didn’t want to think about.

  That night, Toby got his mother’s hand mirror and
carried it out of his bedroom, out onto the porch, where he sat heavily in Uncle Neal’s rocker. He set the mirror in an empty chair, the chair he usually sat in. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. He grasped the mirror and looked at himself. His hair had grown to the point where he looked wild, disgraced. Toby had been thrown into the wrong life. He wanted a life where there was nothing between him and Shelby. He wanted to have that life without having to strand Kaley in the bunker. He was a kidnapper and might soon become something worse, but he was still a kid too. He could feel himself as a kid with a ripening heart who looked forward to things, who borrowed his schemes from the same old shelves as everyone else, who loved dumbly like people were meant to.

  He would’ve given anything to go back to the beginning of the semester. There’d been nothing wrong with his old self. He’d been blind, about a lot of things. He saw now that he’d needed Mr. Hibma’s detentions. He missed them. In detention, he was a kid. Mr. Hibma was the closest thing Toby’d had to an adult who gave a shit about him. He’d made it seem that Toby’s actions had consequences. He’d sat there with Toby, just the two of them, instead of going home, and sometimes the silent air of the classroom had been tinged with relief—Toby and Mr. Hibma, the both of them, relieved to have a part to play. And look at Toby now. He’d been away from the bunker for five days. He could barely get a bite down. He didn’t sleep, didn’t dream. He knew Kaley was out of food. She was starving and he couldn’t eat. As bad as Toby’s life had been, he’d never seen a situation as desperate as Kaley’s was right now. She was alive, but her thoughts had run out. She probably had no more emotions, not a trace of anger.

  Toby looked in the mirror and he couldn’t see anything. He had no idea what he felt toward Kaley, if he would be proud of her if she fought for her life. Toby left the mirror and walked into the woods. Sap oozed down the pine trunks and the azalea patches ogled one another. The only clouds that could survive were the nimble, vicious ones. Toby sensed a disturbance above his head and saw a broad web and a spider with yellow stripes. It had caught some hefty, armored, buzz-sawing beetle from somewhere more tropical than Citrus County. It was amazing that the beetle couldn’t break the web. It was as caught as caught could be. Every couple minutes, when the beetle stilled, the spider shimmied down toward it, knowing it had to do what spiders did, had to wrap the big sucker and administer the poison. When the spider got close, the beetle would flail for all it was worth, quaking the web, almost flinging the spider to the ground. The spider would retreat, wait a minute, then try again. Retreat. Try again. This went on and on.